The world has grown accustomed to mobile telephonic devices (MTD) such as cell phones and phone-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). These devices function in a wireless network where one or more such devices communicate using voice or data to each other or to external services. Services can include making external phone calls to land-line voice networks, making phone calls to other cell phones, leaving or retrieving voice mail messages or exchanging data messages, such as e-mails, text messages, pages and others. Such devices send and receive a variety of communications in a variety of formats. Such devices can also track appointments and store electronic notes. All of the communications, appointments and notes are logged within the device.
As these devices become more ubiquitous, a vast number of communications, appointments and notes may become tracked by the devices. For example, a handheld device may be a mobile repository for a vast number of items, including email messages, short message service (SMS) messages, instant messaging (IM) messages, voice mail messages, other communications, appointments and notes. It is difficult to manage logs of these items when the total number of items is large. Prior art graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on devices provide limited customization of folders, by displaying only logs of items in a chronological list. Items are organized and presented by their respective types of communication technologies or related applications. Different groupings, such as grouping of items by topic or participant, regardless of the type of the item, are not provided. This is problematic when items from different types of communications related to the same topic are captured by the device. While the items are related by the topic, it can be difficult to find them and get an overall view of the status of the discussions on the topic at a given time.
There is a need to address deficiencies in the prior art.